Appeal rejected in airman shooting case

Monday

Nov 20, 2017 at 2:50 PMNov 20, 2017 at 2:50 PM

A divided appeals court Monday rejected arguments that a U.S. Air Force airman did not receive adequate legal representation in a high-profile case stemming from a 2010 shooting outside a Tallahassee bar.

The News Service of Florida

TALLAHASSEE — A divided appeals court Monday rejected arguments that a U.S. Air Force airman did not receive adequate legal representation in a high-profile case stemming from a 2010 shooting outside a Tallahassee bar.

Michael Giles, now 33, was convicted of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison. Giles was charged with shooting another man during a fight between members of two college fraternities, according to court documents.

The ruling Monday by a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal dealt with a decision not to testify by Giles, who contended that he shot in self-defense. After initially declining to testify during the trial, Giles was given another opportunity because evidence was going to be introduced about a statement he gave to police denying any involvement in the incident, Monday's ruling said.

The trial judge required Giles to quickly decide about testifying, which led to Giles again declining to take the stand. The appeal involved arguments that Giles had received “ineffective assistance of counsel” in declining to testify.

But Monday's majority opinion by appeals-court judges T. Kent Wetherell and Stephanie Ray said Giles had “failed to show that counsel's representation fell below an objective standard of reasonableness.”

Judge Scott Makar, however, wrote a pointed dissent. “At the most critical moment in his trial, Michael L. Giles received no advice from his attorney,” Makar wrote. “In this post-conviction case, his trial counsel all but admits his representation was inadequate, abdicating the most crucial decision in the trial to an uninformed client, and deficiently protecting Giles's right to testify in his defense.”

The case of Giles, who was an active-duty airman at the time of the shooting, became high-profile as his backers argued it showed problems with mandatory-minimum sentences and with discrepancies in the way Florida's “stand your ground” self-defense law is applied.